I am writing this in September, while everyone is still talking about the Revolut breach. By the time you read it, another scam, breach or AI tool may be dominating the conversation. So rather than write another postmortem, I want to use the case to think about something broader that has to do with risk. […]
Revolut customers experienced a second breach in a month towards the end of September, as fraudsters social engineered their way into U.S. online brokerage DriveWealth and stole historic personally identifiable information (PII). Anyone who used Revolut to invest in U.S. stock up until December 2023 could be impacted. DriveWealth provides execution and clearing services for […]
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached settlements totaling close to $17 million in cases involving two payment processors accused of facilitating transactions for over 1,000 merchants serving as fronts for fraudulent companies engaged in unauthorized billing scams and tech support scams. The two cases involved Humboldt Merchant Services and Nuvei, and in both the […]
I have spent much of my career in financial crime, compliance and investigations at fast-growing businesses. This has taught me a thing or two about what I’d like to call compliance debt and a “we’ll fix it later” attitude to compliance issues. Years of investigations have taught me: people rarely wake up one morning and […]
Ballerine, a merchant risk and compliance platform for acquirers and payment service providers (PSPs), introduced to market its new agentic detection solution, the Scam & Fraud Detection API, that identifies high-risk merchants and fraud networks in less than 60 seconds before transactions occur. Historically, it has usually taken acquirers anywhere from days to weeks to […]
We will address in this column why most merchants misunderstand what “fighting” a dispute actually means and when escalating to arbitration truly makes economic sense The key is that chargebacks are not resolved based on truth. They are resolved based on incentives. For years, merchants have treated disputes like courtroom battles. Present the facts. Provide […]
